Page 29 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

14 Louise Tythacott
France. 123 Between December 1861 and April 1863, at least seven auctions of “Palais
d’Été” material took place at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris and, one of the most vocal
critics of the loot, Victor Hugo, even acquired his own personal collection. Montauban
presented several hundred pieces to the imperial couple—Napoleon III and Eugénie.
Inspired by these gifts, Eugénie created displays of “Oriental curiosities” in a redesigned
wing of the Palace of Fontainebleau. Here, some of the most significant Yuanmingyuan
treasures—porcelain, jades, cloisonné, gold, lacquer, bronzes, and paintings—were
placed on exhibition in 1863 (see Figure 10.3). As Thomas argues, these were a way
to “reinforce France’s imperial status during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III,” which
depended upon “recognition of similarity and even equivalence between China’s
imperial culture and France’s own royal and imperial heritage.” 124 Even today, several
hundred Chinese objects can be seen in Fontainebleau’s Musée Chinois—discussed by
Droguet and Thomas in Chapters 9 and 10 (see Figures 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 10.1, and 10.4).
One of the key works on the dispersal of the looting of Yuanmingyuan objects,
James Hevia’s, English Lessons (2003), was the first to analyze the trajectories and
locations of the material in the West. In particular, Hevia highlighted the shifting
meanings attached to Summer Palace things, variously depicted as “prizes of war, as
military trophies, as gifts for British and French monarchs, as commodities for sale
on the international auction market, as museum pieces, as objects to be put on display
at international expositions, as curiosities, and later as high art.” 125 Hevia noted how,
at each location, objects acquired “new meanings, ones which rather than clarifying
their status, embedded them more deeply in alien discourses and exotic modes of
cultural production.” 126 Above all, he conceptualizes 1860 loot as signifying imperial
humiliation: 127 “What more commanding image could there be for the constitution
of colonizing subjectivities than the appropriation of the signs of another ‘sovereign’
and the assimilation of these signs to oneself.” 128 Yuanmingyuan treasures thus
functioned as “material proof” of British power over China. 129
In particular, once relocated to Britain or France, Yuanmingyuan material was
reformed to fit the aesthetics and tastes of the time—visual transformations that are
taken up in this volume by Hill (Chapter 4), Pierson (Chapter 5), Droguet (Chapter 9),
and Thomas (Chapter 10). Some pieces became hybridized—the chandelier at
Fontainebleau, for example, which, dismembered and reconfigured, still hangs as the
centerpiece of Eugénie’s Musée Chinois (see Droguet, Chapter 9 and Thomas, Chapter
10, and Figures 9.4, 10.1 and 10.3); or the separation of the “Skull of Confucius”
and its radical reconceptualization after the 1862 exhibition, as noted by Pearce
(Chapter 3) and Hill (Chapter 4). 130 Hill and Pierson (Chapters 4 and 5) assert that
before the arrival of this imperial material, few high-quality Chinese objects had been
widely seen in Europe. 131 The collection and display of Yuanmingyuan artifacts in
Britain and France from the 1860s on thus represented a pivotal shift in the idea of
Chinese “art” in the West. Cocks notes “how . . . connoisseurs realized that for the
first time they were seeing the art made for the elevated tastes of the Imperial Court
instead of the Western export trade.” 132 Pearce too writes that 1860 was a “watershed
in terms of a shift in taste and of interest by Europeans in Chinese art, as it marks
the development in the taste for elaborate eighteenth-century jades, porcelains, and
enamels in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth-century.” 133
Today, Yuanmingyuan material in Western museums is highly politicized, and
is sometimes difficult to locate either on display or in store. As noted earlier, it is
not always clear which of the thousands of buildings in the imperial gardens these